To Thine Own Algorithm Be True

Woe to the reporter who seeks to track Annie Dorsen’s speech patterns. The same combination of speed, breadth and complexity that makes her a thrilling conversationalist means any note taker faces a Sisyphean task.

You might imagine, then, that when Ms. Dorsen tackles “Hamlet,” as she has with “A Piece of Work,” which opens Wednesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, she would pay serious attention to Shakespeare’s words.

Well, sort of. And also, not quite.

Not only does Ms. Dorsen deconstruct the text in dizzying fashion — “It’s a little like if the Dadaists had their way with Shakespeare,” she said — but she has also outsourced the actual scrambling to computer codes and chatbots, creating what she calls “algorithmic theater.” Over the course of five acts, “Hamlet” is reconstituted in five distinct ways; sometimes it’s compressed into a fraction of its length, elsewhere individual lines are pulled radically out of disparate contexts.

In only one section is a human body present: On alternating nights, the third act will be performed by the Wooster Group’s Scott Shepherd or the veteran actor Joan MacIntosh, a founding member of the Performance Group (a seminal company that spawned the Woosters). Each has the daunting task of speaking to the audience the computer’s choices of the night, hearing a one-time-only script through an in-ear feed — “keeping up with the computer brain,” as Ms. MacIntosh put it.

“The quintessential human figure in theater, Hamlet, is turned into this completely post-humanist machine,” said Jon Refsdal Moe, a Norwegian curator who has co-produced several of Ms. Dorsen’s shows, including “A Piece of Work.”

“In theater, you have to deal with this question of audience experience over time,” Ms. Dorsen said, adding that there was also the history of theater to deal with. “What is the fundamental thing that everyone agrees is theater? Do these tools make us think differently about or question that?”

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Annie Dorsen tackles “Hamlet” in “A Piece of Work.”CreditEd Alcock for The New York Times

Though her body of work includes dance (“Pièce Sans Paroles,” with the choreographers D D Dorvillier and Anne Juren), video (“I Miss”) and performance art (“Magical,” with Ms. Juren), she is very much a theater artist. Within the form, her résumé is impressive and diverse: A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, she has a Broadway directing credit to her name for “Passing Strange,” which she helped create, and which was running at the Belasco Theater while her intensely political work “Democracy in America“ was happening in Performance Space 122 in the East Village.

“I remember a day in which I saw ‘Passing Strange’ at a matinee and then went to P.S. 122 to see ‘Democracy in America,’ and I couldn’t believe both projects came from a single artist,” said Gideon Lester, who directs the theater program at Bard College, where Ms. Dorsen developed “A Piece of Work” while in residency last fall. (He is also a curator at the interdisciplinary festival Crossing the Line, where Ms. Dorsen’s “Spokaoke” married political speech with karaoke this fall.)

Moving to Europe, where she has cultivated an impressive, cross-disciplinary network of artistic peers, might have been a logical route for Ms. Dorsen, a native New Yorker who has a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.

“Europe has traditionally had an easier time accepting the post-dramatic in theater,” Mr. Lester said. “The split that happened in the ’60s in the States between theater and performance studies didn’t happen in Europe, so there’s a much easier conversation between the visual arts, performance studies and theater in Europe. And since her work is really straddling all of those fields, I think the context may be more natural for her in Europe.”

Yet “A Piece of Work” will have particular resonances for New York theatergoers, many of whom know the Wooster Group’s “Hamlet,” which also starred Mr. Shepherd. In that production, he contended with Richard Burton’s take on the character; here, he channels a character that emerges in time with the words that make (and unmake) it.

“A meaning is made, and then I’m figuring out in the moment a way to stand behind it,” Mr. Shepherd said, laughing. “It’s kind of hard to beat the computer at this game because the computer is free of self-consciousness, and so it will say anything you give it with equal conviction.”

“The trick for me,” he added, “is to try not to bring my own judgment to that.”

In this sense, the title “A Piece of Work” also describes the pleasurable audience involvement necessary to complete what the actors — human and machine — are striving toward.

“I want to see theater that deals with the world, not just representations of it,” Ms. Dorsen said. “Algorithms are in a way rewriting the world. They’re written by humans, but they’re in the wild.”

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Thine Own Algorithm Be True. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe